Study: Media made difference in water conservation
By Karen Kaplan, Los Angeles Times
What does it take to get Californians to save water during a massive drought? Apparently, a lot of ink and newsprint helps.
Extensive news coverage of the state’s historic drought prompted residents to conserve water, research out of Stanford University suggests. The more that major newspapers wrote about the drought, the more people in the Bay Area cut back on their personal water use, according to a report this week in the journal Science Advances.
Indeed, the overwhelming volume of news stories appears to have motivated Californians to conserve even before Gov. Jerry Brown ordered mandatory water restrictions on April 1, 2015.
